“His results were always negative?”
“Sure. Like I say, he was neurotic. He once told me he lost half his customers because he was so obsessed with disease it turned them off. He would bring his friends to see me, the ones who were too scared to have the test without someone to hold their hand. He was almost like a medic, he learned a lot about the disease. He was intelligent, he picked up the nature of the virus and could talk about it better than I could.”
“He had a death wish?”
A shrug. “That to me is a Western idea. Humans are the only animal which is aware of death, so you could say we must all have either a fascination with it or an inability to face it. If he’d had a genuine death wish he’d be dead, wouldn’t he? It’s not difficult for a boy whore to die in Bangkok, if that’s what he wants to do.”
“But he was strange?”
“Obsessed with the disease. Obsessed with not getting it, but no way was he going to change his profession, even if he could. Not a death wish, maybe a death obsession.”
“In the Buddhist sense?”
“Perhaps. He told me he meditated on death. It was the only reality. I got the feeling he was on the edge, you know? How many of your friends can you watch die when you’re eighteen years old?”
“When did he stop coming to see you?”
A quick glance at me, then away. “I’d have to check. I don’t think I’ve seen him for eight or nine years. Wait, I’ll check. It was before I got this damned computer, so I’ll have to look in the files.”
“It might not be that important. You never saw him with a black American? A very big man, a marine?”
“No. Never.”
“He never told you he was changing sex?”
Raised eyebrows. “That’s what he did?”
“Surprised?”
A frown. “Yes, surprised.”
“Why? It’s not unusual, is it?”
“No, not unusual, not around here. But you get a feeling for these creatures, the men as well as the women. They come in all shapes and sizes. Canny businesspeople some of them, on the game until they’ve saved enough capital to open a bar or a hairdresser’s. Others are the same inadequates you see on the streets all over the world, with not only their bodies for sale but their personalities as well-slaves. They’re the ones who go for the operation, generally. With no identity to speak of they have nothing to lose. He never struck me as like that. Oh, he was as gay as a lark, but he had a strong mind. A good head on his shoulders. He knew who he was.”
“Not a natural for the operation?”
“Look, I’m not a shrink, what do I know? I don’t even practice medicine anymore, I find it too stressful, so I only do blood tests.”
“There were pictures of boys dying of AIDS on the wall of his apartment. Some of them looked already dead.”
“That sounds like him.”
“I think he sat in his hovel staring at them for hours on end.”
“Of course he did.”
Out on Silom I pass a bookstore with a new biography of Pol Pot. There are aberrations on the Buddhist Path, just like any other. Pol Pot was a monk before he decided to kill a million of his own people. Sometimes the reality of death becomes overwhelming-and compelling.
At River City I pause before taking the escalator to Warren’s shop. I’m nervous, without knowing why. Well, I guess I do know why. Fatima killed Bradley-and Pichai. I’m supposed to kill her, aren’t I? How to kill that boy who sat in a hovel exactly the same size as mine, crying for his dead friends, just like me, wondering what the hell it’s all about-just like me? When I steel my nerves to take the elevator, she’s not there. A different assistant, a very well-groomed young man who may or may not be gay, gives me a disapproving stare as I walk in. I make my excuses and leave quickly, relieved I don’t have to kill anyone today. Back in my hovel I am Ussiri again, back in his hovel, meditating on death. I bet he’d gone very deep into himself by the time he met Bradley.
Now the mind, in its inexplicable wandering, strikes off in a more practical direction. Monday, I use my mobile to call a clerk in the Lands Department who is amenable to persuasion. I promise him a thousand baht if he will make a few simple checks on his computer. He calls me back in half an hour with a very different address.
If you want to catch a whore at home, even a retired one, go in the morning. Old habits die hard. After more than a decade in retirement Nong, for example, never rises before eleven.
By the mid-nineties Thailand had established itself as a bona fide Asian tiger, complete with expensive roar and land prices shooting through the roof. Families who had had useless lumps of land on their hands for generations found themselves courted by estate agents and developers and became millionaires overnight. Bangkok was a hub, and there’s nothing better than that for a city to be, is there? The magic words “developing economy” brought in hundreds of thousands of foreigners, all of whom needed places to live of international quality. Apartment buildings rose from steamy fields like mushrooms. Some of the best of them are to be found off Sukhumvit between Soi 33 and Soi 39, where the apartments rejoice in that attention to detail for which our Japanese cousins are justly famous. Every second restaurant and supermarket around here is Japanese, you can buy sushi, tapanyaki, tofu, harami, tempura, kushikatsu, otumani any time of the day or night. At the end of Soi 39, near Petchaburi Road, the three gigantic towers of the Supalai complex rise to kiss the muggy sky. The guard at the desk in the lobby wants to call up to the occupant of the four-thousand-square-foot penthouse, and can be dissuaded only with five hundred baht and a promise of incarceration if he gives me any more trouble.
Now I am riding the elevator to the thirtieth floor, wondering if today is the day I kill her. On the other hand, I have taken the professional precaution of bringing a small Dictaphone.
It is 10:35 a.m. and, standing outside the impressive double oak doors guarded by Chinese gods in green, red and white porcelain, I can hear the television when I press the bell. Sudden silence as the TV is switched off. Only the neurotically sensitive hearing of a cop like me could discern the soft padding of bare feet across the floor. Now I am being observed through the spyhole. Someone is giving serious thought to what to do next.
It takes five minutes, then the dull thud of a heavy bolt, a couple of clicks for the other locks, and I am face to face with an icon.
Even surprised at home at this ungodly hour, she is nothing less than magnificent. A green and red silk kimono tied up negligently at the waist, her thick black hair hanging down over her shoulders, pearls in her ears, rings on her fingers, designer flesh, modest smile-“Sawadee ka.”
“Good morning, Fatima. Nice apartment.”
“Please come in.”
It is a duplex. A polished teak staircase leads to the bedrooms upstairs whilst the eye is drawn to the floor-to-ceiling windows with a magnificent view of the city.
43
Despite her impeccable postures, I have a sense that the shell has cracked. Smiles, frowns, hand gestures-fragments of personality-come and go, as if dredged up from memory, whilst something quite different, beyond the human, seems to control her. From time to time I think she is glaring at me, until I realize there is a total blackness behind the eyes when the postures fail.